KiMo Theatre

The KiMo opened on Central Avenue on September 19, 1927, a “Pueblo Deco” picture palace built by Italian-born businessman Oreste Bachechi and designed by Carl Boller with motifs drawn from Pueblo and Navajo art. Its name came from a newspaper contest won by Pablo Abeita, a former governor of Isleta Pueblo, who combined Tiwa words meaning “mountain lion.” Bachechi died a year after it opened, and his family ran the theater for decades.

On August 2, 1951, during an Abbott and Costello film, a water heater exploded in the lobby. Six-year-old Bobby Darnall was killed, and several other people were injured. A fire in the early 1960s later damaged the stage, the theater closed in 1970, and in 1977 Albuquerque voters chose to buy and restore it rather than see it demolished. It is now a city-run performing-arts venue on the National Register of Historic Places.

Bobby’s death became the theater’s ghost story. Performers and crew describe a small boy in a striped shirt and jeans playing on the lobby stairs, and blame him for tripped actors, dropped lines and missing props. The best-known tale says that during a production of A Christmas Carol – usually dated to 1974 – staff took down the doughnuts that crews had hung on a backstage pipe as an offering to Bobby, and the show promptly went wrong. Ever since, the story goes, casts have left doughnuts and trinkets at a backstage shrine for him.

When skeptic Benjamin Radford investigated with writer Mike Smith for Skeptical Inquirer (2009), he found that on Christmas Day 1974 the KiMo was running adult films, not plays. The pair traced the production to December 1986; its lead actor and its director both remembered nothing unusual, no review mentioned any mishap, and only the stage technician who first told the story recalled a ruined show. Radford concluded that the legend is folklore and misremembering. He also found that Bobby’s surviving siblings felt exploited by the story told about their brother’s death. The doughnut tradition continues all the same, as theater custom rather than evidence.

A small boy in a striped shirt on the lobby staircase, actors tripped on stage, props and lighting cues going wrong – reported mainly by performers and crew, and linked by tradition to the doughnut offerings backstage.

The lobby and its staircase, where the 1951 explosion happened, and backstage around the pipe and shrine where offerings are left; most stories are told around rehearsals and performances.

The doughnut shrine has become part of the KiMo’s backstage culture and is mentioned in nearly every article about haunted Albuquerque. The theater remains a major venue for concerts, films and local productions.